Matteo Gullà
Creative Director
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Futures_Cover.jpg

FUTURES

A fully-illustrated, 44-page annual publication giving young people a real look inside today's military — careers, education, and what life looks like off duty. Not a recruiting brochure. A magazine people would actually want to read.

 ROLE: Creative & Design Director

YEAR: 2020

DISCIPLINE:

Editorial Direction illustration art direction typography

FUTURES Magazine

CLIENT:  U.S. Department of Defense

THE REACH:

22,000+ printed copies nation wide

Distributed each fall to high schools and community colleges nationwide.

THE ASK:

FUTURES needed to do something most military materials don't: feel like a magazine, not a pamphlet. The brief was 44 pages covering six branches, dozens of career paths, and the reality of service — on duty and off — without ever reading like a government document. It had to hold the attention of 17-year-olds deciding what comes next, and stand up next to the magazines already on their coffee table.

EDITORIAL STRUCTURE:

Forty-four pages is a lot of ground — careers, education benefits, day-to-day life, downtime. I directed the pacing so it read in sections instead of one long scroll of information: quick hits for scanners, longer feature spreads for readers who wanted to sit with a story. Every spread earned its place instead of filling space.

 
 
 

TYPOGRAPHY & SYSTEM:

The type system had to flex across service branches, career features, and lifestyle stories without losing consistency. I built a hierarchy that let headlines carry personality issue to issue while keeping the underlying grid disciplined — so the magazine felt considered, not chaotic, cover to back page.

 
 

ILLUSTRATION:

I hand-illustrated the cover and the main feature spread myself, then directed the illustration style for the rest of the issue against that benchmark — matching approach to story, a more graphic, poster-like treatment for career spreads, looser and more narrative linework for the off-duty features. Being the one who drew the pages that set the tone made it a lot easier to keep everything else on-model.

 

MY ROLE:

I led creative and design direction for FUTURES end to end, and hand-illustrated the cover and main feature spread myself — concept, art direction, typography, and the editorial pacing that ties 44 pages of very different stories into one publication. This ran alongside my work on Today's Military and Cyber Mission, part of a broader effort to make DoD-produced content feel less like government material and more like something people choose to pick up.